If Only It Were That Easy
Many people see training a dog as a one-time process. They’ll take a class or hire a trainer to help them for a while or for a particular problem and once the course is over they think, “Great! The dog is trained now.”
On the one hand I commend these people, because at least they understand that a dog needs to be trained. Training meaning taught to respond to human verbal cues generally by performing certain positions or activities and to follow a human list of expectations for manners and interactions. Dogs don’t come that way.
However, their expectations are not realistic and therefore they are likely to be disappointed either in the training process, the specific trainer, the methodology employed, or all of the above.
This “take-one-class-and-run” approach used to be common at our puppy school; people would happily register their tiny pup for a puppy class, but not the all-important follow up class that coincided with adolescence. As if any skill can be trained to completion, let alone mastered, in only six one-hour sessions. Not to mention the fact that puppy insecurity and compliance quickly erodes in adolescence without further building on the necessary foundation of a good puppy class. Not to mention that most human students in class are as new to the skill of dog training as their young pup, meaning that rank novices are in the position of teaching rank novices a new skill. Pretty challenging stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, a good puppy class is a good thing and provides an excellent launching pad for smooth sailing later in life, but it is only the first step in a lifelong process. This is the part that so many dog owners fail to grasp. This is where disillusionment and frustration begins and where human-dog relations begin to break down. “Dogs want to please humans naturally, don’t they? Dogs are genetically designed to obey a pack leader, right? He KNOWS what he did wrong!”
The thing is dogs don’t speak human, don’t abide by the same social rules as us, don’t communicate in the same way we do, and don’t come with remote controls or programs that can be installed once, like a computer. This makes them infinitely interesting to me as a different species with a mind of it’s own that mostly lives in harmony with us, especially if we take the time to learn what makes them tick.
Think about it. You wouldn’t get a car without learning how to drive it, would you?
One way dogs are similar to people is that they generally don’t do things that aren’t to their benefit somehow. Pretty smart, eh? Especially from the biological viewpoint of survival. In this way they are quite a bit like us.
In other words, they learn the way we learn, even if their idea of what is good or bad or right or wrong is different from ours. So we humans should be able to understand that practice makes perfect, rewards and resource accumulation goes a long way, and punishment and frightening experiences can inhibit behavior or cause superstitious beliefs.
If we look at it from this perspective training a dog can easily be seen in entirely new light. And shedding light on a subject makes it clearer. Would you be able to master tango dancing in only six sessions? (I assure you it hasn't happend for me!) Can you recite the poem you learned in first grade for your first parent day performance, or are you a little rusty without practice? Would you know exactly how to behave socially at an event in a foreign country, or is it possible that you might accidentally offend someone with your actions?
Next time you are training your dog please keep these things in mind and take the time to patiently explain what you’d like them to do and if they get it wrong take sometime to figure out why. It is probably not because they are just being stubborn or are challenging your authority.
The alternative, if you want easy and instantaneous, is to go train this dog instead.
